Be brilliant, anywhere

I’ve been having a lot of conversations recently with great creative people who are frustrated by the environments they work in. It seems the perpetual politics of big organisations is draining some of our best people.

These conversations happened to coincide with me discovering ROAM, whose tagline reads: “Make this life an adventure. Join interesting people in interesting places – for a week or a lifetime”. Their business model lets renters move from one house to the next, in different locations around the globe, under one lease agreement.

I think it’s genius and offers an environment for business nomads to take their adventurous spirits from one inspiring experience to the next. Freedom from borders, space and time, and just the ability to create and grow.

The idea that creativity functions nine to five at a desk is outdated. We know this, and yet we insist creatives keep ‘office hours’ and ‘time sheets’, while still demanding killer ideas. Is it impossible to imagine that if creativity is sparked by sitting on a beach in Bali, we encourage and allow this process?

Now I’m not advocating a vacuum in which each team member work quietly from a different beach around the world (although how cool could project meetings be!). Feeling part of something, a team, bouncing off other’s ideas and opinions is paramount to creative excellence. The best people I work with love to collaborate with other great talent, and watching the idea that is born in the middle of two great skill sets is intoxicating.

But by forcing creative explorers to sit in an office day to day we’re choosing process over creativity, prioritising accountability over trust, and placing value in the bottom line rather than the commercial power of a great idea.

There’s a revolution coming in working spaces. And it’s not just today's technology, by allowing us to be effectively connected remotely, that is driving this change. It’s the attitudes and ambitions of the talented, skilled, young people making up our creative work force.

If our best people want to be more flexible with their time, let them be. We all know how hard it is to find great talent. Let’s trust them to do the job we’re paying them to do, wherever they can best do it. Let’s not hire them to sit in an office, let’s hire them to be brilliant.